Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The official Atlas Quest 2008 letterboxing calendars arrived in my mailbox this afternoon. There were three of them, one for each edition. This is always the exciting part for me, to touch and feel those very first calendars. Flipping through each page, worried there might be something unexpectedly wrong that needs fixing, then breathing a sigh of relief when it turned out exactly like I imagined.

The first year, a few of the pictures were garbled. The pictures were fine on my computer, and the thumbnail images where I uploaded them looked fine, but when they were printed, all sorts of problems and distortions arrived. None of that this time.

Last year, the photos looked great, but there it had a ton of holidays I'd never even heard of. I kind of clicked which types holidays I wanted from a list: US holidays, Canadian holidays, religious holidays (for Catholics, Protestants, Jewish, and probably a couple of other religions whose holidays I'd never even heard of before), and more.

It was a bit crowded, so I narrowed down the list a bit. Not to mention that a couple of notable holidays were missing, such as Mother's Day. Hello? So I had to fix the problems with the dates.

This year, however, every calendar looked great. I was a bit worried about the photos without quotes, the photos that filled up the entire page. That was how I initially imagined the calendar, but the photos weren't of a high enough resolution. Nowadays, there's still some low-res photos coming in (my own, for instance, the cheap camera that it is!), but a larger proportion of them are much higher resolution photos that can easily stretch to fit the whole page.

And honestly, it's less work for me that way. I don't have to position the photo, find a quote to go with it, and so forth. (The labor I saved, however, ended up going into the creation of THREE calendars this year instead of one!) So I thought I'd try the "blow up the picture to fill the whole space," but I worried it wouldn't turn out as nice as I hoped. That was one of my bigger worries as I started flipping through the calendars one page at a time, but it turned out very well.

The photos also overlap the edge of the calendar, so the very edges of the calendars get cropped out. I have to leave a bit of blank space along the edges knowing there needed to be a small margin that would get cut off, but not knowing exactly where the cutoff would happen. Would credits get chopped out? Would a quote at the bottom of the page become perforated with holes from the spiral binding? I left what I thought was plenty of space, but the only way to be sure was to order them and see how they looked when printed.

And one photo in particular I worried might be a bit too grainy. In my paint program, it looked extremely grainy when I blew up the photo, and I worried it would show up in the printed calendar. Happily, it too turned out great.

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the calendars. At least nothing wrong that I didn't already know about before it arrived like that "it's" spelling mistake. =)

In any case, the calendars look GREAT! I took a picture of the real things which I'll post at some point, but I'm quite happy with the results. I'll leave the AQ Marketplace open for another week or so--I'll post a reminder about two days before I close it for good--for those who want to order them. You'll still be able to order them after the marketplace closes, but you'll have to order them direct from the publisher, and unless you plan to buy several dozen of them at a time, they won't give you a bulk discount so it'll cost a bit more. I'll be buying in bulk and am passing the savings on.

The downside, of course, is that I won't put in the bulk order until after the marketplace closes and I know exactly how many calendars I need to order. Then they have to print the calendars, ship the order to me, and I'll repackage them all to forward on to you. So you probably won't receive the calendar until mid-October sometime.